Islam
and Christianity
(pdf available here)
A
lecture to the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, under the auspices
of the Iranian Institute for Interreligious Dialogue in Tehran,
March 2005
I should like to say first how pleased I am to
be here in Tehran and to have the opportunity to meet Muslim
scholars and to try to contribute something to the on-going
dialogue between our two faiths.
First let me indicate my own position within Christianity, which
is as internally varied as is the Islamic world. I am an ordained
minister of the United Reformed Church, which is a small part
of the section of Christianity that split away from the Roman
Catholic church in the 16th century CE, and within this I belong
to the reforming end of the spectrum of positions. It is from
this point of view that I am speaking. I am not however an official
representative of that church, but am here entirely in my own
personal capacity.
oooOooo
Islam and Christianity are both based on revelation, both religions
of the Book, meaning the holy Qur'an, revealed through the Prophet
Mohammad (peace be upon him), and the holy Bible, revealed through
a number of different writers - both, together with other holy
scriptures, being expressions of the heavenly Hidden Book or
Preserved Book referred to several times in the Qur'an.
The traditional Muslim belief, as I understand it, is that the
Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet over a period of some twenty
years through the angel Gabriel; and that the Torah and the
New Testament are likewise from God but that the texts have
become corrupted at the various points at which they differ
from the Qur'an. In the case of the New Testament a prominent
example of the distortion claim is the biblical account of Jesus'
death on the cross.
From a modern Christian point of view the situation is more
complex than this. First, it is often said by Christian theologians
that our revelation is contained, not in a book, but in the
person of Jesus (peace be upon him). However we only know about
Jesus through the New Testament, particularly the four gospels.
For many centuries, until within about the last hundred and
fifty years, it was almost universally assumed by Christians
that these are contemporary and historically reliable accounts
of Jesus' life and teachings. But the modern historical study
of the New Testament has led to the generally agreed conclusion
that the earliest gospel, that of Mark, was written around 70
CE, about forty years after the time of Jesus; that Mathew and
Luke were written in the 80's, using Mark as a their main source
together with a possible, but disputed, second common source
called Q, and other separate sources of their own; and that
the gospel of John was written around the end of the century,
some seventy or more years after Jesus' time. None of them was
written by an eye witness to Jesus' life, but they relay stories
and sayings handed down, and inevitably elaborated in the retelling,
within the early Christian community, the different writers
moulding their material in distinctively different ways according
to their own interests and points of view. The result is that
there is today endlessly inconclusive discussion and disagreement
about whether this or that saying and action attributed to Jesus
in the gospels is or is not historically authentic.
So from the point of view of modern Christian scholarship the
New Testament does indeed contain doubtful sayings attributed
to Jesus and doubtful stories about him, not however because
the original text was infallible and later became corrupted,
but because of the nature of the gospels as having been written
two or three generations after the event by different writers
over a period of about thirty years, and in an age when the
modern concept of biographical accuracy was unknown. This is
a result of the historical study of the gospels, and I suppose
the equivalent use in Islam of an historical method to discriminate
between more and less reliable material is in the careful study
of the hadiiths. But the basic difference between Islam and
Christianity in this area is that, whilst both the Bible and
the Qur'an are sacred scriptures, within Christianity there
is space for discussion and variety of opinion as to the correct
text, whereas within Islam there is no uncertainty about the
text itself, but space for discussion and variety of opinion
in its interpretation.
However for many centuries, as I said, Christians generally
assumed that, as the famous evangelical preacher Billy Graham
once put it, 'The Bible is a book written by God through sixty
secretaries'. And there is still a numerous and strong body
of Christians who adhere to that view, mainly in Africa and
in the southern part of the United States of America. But among
Christian scholars there has come to be an increasing recognition
of the human contribution to the formation of the scriptures.
The four gospels, and also the letters of Paul and the other
New Testament documents, reflect the cultural and political
situations within which they were written, the religious ideas
and practices of the Judaism of the time, the presupposed world
view of first century CE Mediterranean culture, and the individual
concerns of the writers and of their own local Christian communities.
This is, I would suggest, to be expected. For any divine revelation
to humanity, if it is to be intelligible to we human beings,
must come through human minds and must be expressed in a human
language and in terms of the conceptual world embodied in that
language, all of which are the products of a particular culture
in a particular part of the earth at a particular point in human
history. This does not mean that the process is not genuinely
revelatory, but that revelation is necessarily mediated through
human beings in all their specific historical particularity.
oooOooo
Further, in the Bible there are two very different and incompatible
conceptions of God and of God's will for humanity. The Torah
tells us that when the Israelites came out of Egypt to occupy
the land of Canaan, and were fighting the existing tribe of
Amorites, 'the Lord threw down great stones from heaven upon
them. . . there were more who died because of the hailstones
than the men of Israel slew with the sword ' (Joshua 10: 11),
and then that God made the sun stand still for a whole day so
they could have more time to slay the Amorites (10: 15); and
later, when they were fighting the tribe of Amelek, God commanded
the Israelites, 'Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy
all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and
woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass' (I
Samuel 15: 3). This is a picture of a violent tribal warrior
god. But there are other, later books of the Hebrew scriptures
in which a quite different understanding of God is expressed,
as the universal Lord who is gracious and merciful to all and
not only to the Israelites. In the words of one of the psalms,
'as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast
love toward all who fear him; as far as the east is from the
west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us' (Psalm
103: 11-12).
In line with this latter Jewish conception of God, in the teaching
of Jesus God is a God of love and mercy, and we should emulate
these virtues on earth. He taught, 'You have heard that it was
said, "You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy".
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven,
for he makes his sun shine on the evil and on the good, and
sends rain on the just and on the unjust' (5: 43-5). Again,
later in the new Testament we read, 'God is love. . . He who
does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God
whom he has not seen' (I John 4: 7, 20).
The result of this wide variety within the Bible is that in
using it we all inevitably select, either consciously or unconsciously.
Some Jews and some Christians appeal to the violent and vengeful
conception, and others, the greatest number today, to the very
different conception of God as Love.
oooOooo
Now I would suggest that the general principle of human mediation
must apply to the formation of the Qur'an. This is in a particular
human language, Arabic; it has as its religious background the
Prophet's decisive break with the existing Arabian polytheism;
it reflects the life-story of the Prophet himself, the history
of the new Muslim community in Mecca, the Hijra, the community's
battles against those who were trying to destroy the new faith,
their later return in triumph to Mecca, the social life of the
new community, and all this against the background of the basic
cultural ethos of Arabia at that time.
There is in one respect, however, a significant difference between
the Qur'an and the Christian Gospels. In the Arabia into which
the Prophet was born the whole commercial and political structure
of Mecca was bound up with the existing polytheism. The ruling
merchant aristocracy depended upon their control of the sacred
place, the Kaaba, with the lucrative pilgrimages and trade that
it attracted. In this situation the revelations to the Prophet
inevitably had political and economic implications that profoundly
threatened the existing system. Because the message that he
brought required radical social reform, it was strongly and
sometimes violently resisted by the Meccan ruling class, to
the point at which the then small Muslim community had to leave
- hence the Hijra to Medina. Here they set up an Islamic state,
for the governance of which the Qur'an contains a good deal
of social teaching about such matters as the observance of treaties,
trade and commerce, lending and borrowing, marriage and divorce,
punishment for crimes, the rules for a just war and the conduct
of war, and other matters.
In contrast to this, the Gospels contain no social teaching
in the sense of rules and laws for the governance of society.
For Jesus had no political power or responsibility. He lived
in an occupied country under foreign rule, that of Rome. And
he seems to have expected the end of the present Age to come
quite soon, within the lifetime of his hearers. The existing
society would then be swept away and God's rule established
on earth. The early church, as reflected in the letters of Paul,
continued in this belief, which however we see gradually fading
over the decades as the End failed to come and the Christian
community had to come to terms with life in a continuing and
increasingly hostile environment. But in Jesus' teaching the
supposed imminent end of the Age meant that it was not within
his horizon of concerns to formulate laws for an independently
organised national state. Principles of social justice and peace
are certainly implicit in his basic moral teaching, available
for the future, and many of the churches today are trying to
apply them to society, but in Jesus' own teaching they remained
implicit. It was only four centuries later, after Christianity
had become the religion of the Roman empire, with church and
state being now virtually one, that Christian bishops and abbots
became political authorities taking part in the governance of
society.
oooOooo
An important question that arises for both religions is whether
the social norms and practices of Christianity in the Roman
empire, and of Islam in its first decades after the Hijra, are
divinely intended for all time, or were specifically for those
historical situations. In the case of Christianity, some of
the laws and social norms developed in Roman times and the subsequent
centuries are today regarded as relevant and valid today whilst
many others are not. Many have been left behind in the past
because they presupposed a culture and a state of human knowledge
which the have been superseded. For many centuries the churches
persecuted and murdered Jews, and there was a time when they
lived much for safely under Islamic rule. Again, for many centuries
Christians believed in witchcraft, and thousands of women identified
as witches were persecuted and many killed. This latter would
count as murder today. At one time people who questioned any
of the established doctrines of the church were labelled heretics
and many were burned or hanged. This would also count as murder
today. For two and a half centuries, until the abolition movement
beginning in the late eighteenth century, British and American
society, supported in this by the churches, accepted slavery
as divinely ordained. Again, more recently, for many years the
Christian churches of the dominant Dutch Reformed tradition
defended apartheid in South Africa on biblical grounds. And
all these practices were incompatible with the basic moral teaching
of Jesus about valuing others as you value yourself and about
reflecting the divine love and forgiveness in our dealings with
others.
And so within Christianity today except, as I must add, within
much of the very large highly conservative wing, we distinguish
between on the one hand Jesus' own ethical principles, and on
the other hand the fallible and changing rules adopted by different
Christian societies in different places and at different times.
And I would pose the question whether the same basic distinction
may be in order within Islam. This would be in accordance with
those Muslim scholars who distinguish between the basic religious
truths revealed in the early Meccan suras, which are eternally
valid and relevant, and the later development of social legislation
for the Muslim community in Medina and in the second Meccan
period in a cultural, political and historical situation which
no longer exists today. It would also be in accord with the
development of our human understanding of what justice and fairness
mean. For I understand that many Muslim thinkers, condemning
the practice of slavery in the past within Muslim societies,
now maintain that this was specific to a particular epoch and
that its abolition, which was not then possible, has since become
timely. The eternal validity versus the continuous adaptability,
of past social practices is, I know, a controversial question
within Islam, but my impression is that such elements of the
shariah as the stoning to death of someone taken in adultery
(not found in the Qur'an itself), is on the statute books in
Iran but, I understand, not in fact practiced. The cutting off
of a thief's hand does have a basis in the Qur'an (5: 38). This
in practiced in Saudi Arabia, and is on the statute books in
some other Islamic countries, including Iran, even though today,
I understand, very seldom actually carried out. It was a pre-Islamic
practice that was accepted at the time of the Prophet, but it
derives from a time and a society in which there were no prison
systems such as exist today, in which graded punishments are
possible by means of longer and shorter prison sentences. I
imagine that in due course, as legal systems evolve, such extremely
harsh practices will be left behind.
At any rate, it seems to me as a non-Muslim who has nevertheless
made some amateur study of the Qur'an, that its most powerful
and pervasive message is of Allah's unfathomable grace and mercy.
As you know, every single sura invokes the name of Allah rahman
rahim, gracious and merciful, and there are throughout numerous
statements such as that 'If you follow the path shown by God,
He will give you a standard, and overlook your sins, and forgive
you. God is abounding in benevolence' (8: 28), and injunctions
such as 'Repel evil with good. Then you will find your erstwhile
enemy like a close, affectionate friend' (41: 34), or 'Those
who are helpless, men, women, and children . . who do not know
the way, may well hope for the mercy of God, and God is full
of mercy and grace' (4: 98), or 'Beg your Lord to forgive you
and turn to Him. Indeed [He] is compassionate and forgiving'
(11: 90), Allah is 'all-forgiving and merciful' (2: 54), with
very numerous other verses of the same kind. Allah is as infinite
in mercy as in power. Should not this fundamental message of
Allah's grace and mercy then be reflected in the norms and laws
of Muslim societies?
There is, I should add, the same message within Christianity
of the limitless love of God, and the same failure to mirror
this at many points in the behaviour of Christian countries
throughout history. There is today nothing Christian about the
destruction of Iraq or the treatment of prisoners in the Abu
Graib prison in Baghdad or in the American prison at Gauntanamo
Bay or in American support, strongly encouraged by President
Bush's huge fundamentalist constituency in the United States,
for the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. And yet many
such things, within both faiths, have been defended on biblical
or on qur'anic grounds. In my opinion we all need to be open
to new ethical insights as the state of human society develops.
oooOooo
'Fundamentalism' is used sometimes to describe a state of mind,
sometimes a way of understanding sacred scriptures, and very
often the conjunction of both. As a state of mind it is dogmatic,
intolerant, constantly seeking to impose itself on others, and
readily inclined to verbal and sometimes physical violence.
This mentality can be found within every one of the great world
religions, and also, I would add, in purely secular societies.
For in this sense, there can be fundamentalist atheists, who
have no scriptures. As a way of understanding scripture, fundamentalism
is uncritically literalistic, taking no account of the human
circumstances within which revelation occurs, and always selecting
some scriptural verses as authoritative whilst ignoring others
that conflict with them. We are familiar within Christianity
with the term 'Christian fundamentalist', meaning those who
are fundamentalists in both senses, and I personally prefer
the equivalent term 'Muslim fundamentalist', when it applies,
to the term 'Islamist' which is today the widely used in the
west. Within Christianity we don't call our fundamentalists
'Christianists' or 'Christianityists'. And likewise I would
prefer to speak of Muslim fundamentalists than of Islamists
because 'Islamist', applied to violent extremists justifying
their activity by a selective use of the Qur'an, suggests that
they represent authentic Islam. I can understand how it is that
oppressed peoples, whether in Palestine or in Iraq or elsewhere,
faced with the overwhelming fire power of tanks and helicopter
gunships, resort to the desperate forms of resistance available
to them, including suicide bombing, first practiced by the Japanese
kamakazi pilots in the second world war. But when this ceases
to be a form of warfare and becomes a form of terrorism, targeting
innocent men, women, and children I cannot see that it can ever
be morally and religiously justified. The son of a friend of
mine was killed in the Bali bombing in 2002, which has been
attributed to 'Islamist' extremists. He and his friends were
completely innocent non-political civilian tourists. And to
kill them, as part of a general opposition to the west, was
to my mind beyond justification. I would say the same of the
indiscriminate shelling and bombing of cities in which great
numbers of civilian men, women and children are being killed
by the armies of Christian nations.
oooOooo
Let me now turn to theological questions. First, concerning
Jesus. The official Xian doctrine, finally established at the
Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, is that Jesus Christ was both
God and man, having two complete natures, one divine and the
other human. This doctrine involved the further doctrine of
the Trinity, with Jesus as God the Son, the second person of
a divine trinity, incarnate. This has been the orthodox Christian
belief ever since, with those in the past, and indeed today
within the Catholic church, who have questioned it often being
persecuted as heretics. In recent decades however, in the light
of the modern historical study of the New Testament and the
early history of the church, there has been a good deal of new
thinking and re-understanding. It is now widely agreed among
New Testament scholars that Jesus himself, the historical individual,
did not think of himself as divine and did not teach anything
like the later doctrine of the Incarnation. The New Testament
sayings in which Jesus seems to claim divinity, such as 'He
who has seen me has seen the Father', 'I and the Father are
one', 'I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to
the Father but by me', are all in the fourth gospel, the gospel
of John, and it is widely agreed that they cannot responsibly
be attributed to the historical Jesus, but are words put into
his mouth by a Christian writer around the end of the first
century, some seventy or so years after Jesus' time, and expressing
the developing faith of the church at that time.
There is no reason why you should be familiar with the names
of contemporary Christian biblical scholars, but let me very
briefly quote just a few. The ones I shall quote are all personally
firm believers in the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation;
but nevertheless they do not believe that Jesus himself taught
it. Referring to the fourth gospel sayings which I have just
cited, the doyen of conservative New Testament scholars in Britain,
Professor Charles Moule of Cambridge University, wrote, 'Any
case for a 'high' Christology [that is, one affirming Jesus'
divinity] that depended on the authenticity of the alleged claims
of Jesus about himself, especially in the Fourth Gospel, would
indeed be precarious' (The Origin of Christology, 1977, 136).
Then a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who
was also a distinguished New Testament scholar, wrote quite
bluntly, 'Jesus did not claim deity for himself' (Jesus and
the Living Past, 1980, 39). And one of the leading generally
conservative British New Testament scholars today, Professor
James Dunn of Durham University, says that 'there was no real
evidence in the earliest Jesus tradition of what could fairly
be called a consciousness of divinity' (Christology in the Making,
1980, 60). Indeed in the earliest gospel, that of Mark, Jesus
is reported as saying, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good
but God alone' (Mark 10: 18).
oooOooo
I come now to the term 'Son of God'. Again, modern historical
scholarship has thrown important light. We now know that the
term 'son of God' was a familiar metaphor within Judaism. Israel
as a whole was called God's son, Adam was called God's son,
the angels were called sons of God, the ancient Hebrew kings
were enthroned as son of God and we have in the Old Testament
the enthronement formula : 'Thou art my son. This day I have
begotten you' (Psalm 2: 7); and indeed any outstandingly pious
Jew could be called a son of God, meaning someone who was close
to God, doing Gods' will, perhaps with a special mission from
God. But within Judaism this was quite obviously a metaphor.
Jesus himself used it in this way when he said that we are to
forgive our enemies 'so that you may be sons of your father
who is in heaven' (Matthew 5: 45). Again, in the prayer that
he taught we address God as 'Our Father who is in heaven', for
in this metaphorical sense we can all speak of God as our Father.
But what happened in the period between Jesus' lifetime and
the full development of the trinitarian doctrine, is that the
metaphorical son of God was transformed in Christian thinking
into the metaphysical God the Son, second person of a divine
trinity. It is this development that is questioned by a number
of Christian thinkers today.
Within the very early church a division soon began between the
original Jewish Christianity based in Jerusalem, which continued
for a while as a new movement within Judaism, seeing Jesus as
a human being with a special divine calling, and on the other
hand the Pauline development which took the Jesus movement far
beyond Judaism into the Hellenistic world and exalted Jesus
to a divine status. From then on the dominant Christian theology
was done in Hellenistic terms. But the great Christian historian
Adolf von Harnack, followed by others, has argued that the Judaic
Jesus movement lingered on further east, into Syria and possibly
to the borders of Arabia, its ideas being known even more widely,
and that their picture of Jesus as a great servant of God may
well have been known in Arabia in the time of the prophet of
Islam. This is uncertain, and a matter of debate among the historians,
but the understanding of Jesus within Jewish Christianity was
very similar to the picture of him in the Qur'an. So much so
that some have speculated that the Prophet's own knowledge about
Jesus may have come from this source.
oooOooo
My own understanding of Jesus as a human being rather than as
God incarnate (or as the second person of a divine trinity incarnate)
differs from the Qur'anic understanding of him only at two points.
One is the doctrine of the virginal conception of Jesus by Mary.
We read in the Qur'an 'She [Mary] said: "How can I have
a son, O Lord, when no man has touched me?" He [an angel]
said: "That is how He decrees a thing, He says 'Be', and
it is' (2: 47). This is similar to the story in Matthew's Gospel,
'When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they
came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit'
(Matt. 1: 18), and again in Luke's Gospel (Luke 1: 25). However
in the New Testament as a whole the story has a very slender
basis, occurring only in these two relatively late Gospels,
eighty or more years after the event, and seems to be unknown
to all the other, mostly earlier, New Testament writers. For
this reason, together with the fact that miraculous birth stories
tended to gather around great figures in the ancient world -
for example, the Buddha, Zoroaster, and various figures in Greek
and Roman religion - many New Testament scholars today doubt
its historicity. Following them I myself do not affirm the virginal
conception of Jesus.
The other point at which I differ from the Quran'ic account
of Jesus is in his crucifixion. As you know, this account says
that 'they neither killed nor crucified him, though it so appeared
to them' (4: 157, or 155 on a different arrangement of the text).
And the reason for this, I presume, is the idea that so great
a servant and messenger of God could not be killed by human
hands. If I may enter into a non-polemical discussion about
this, I would point out that in the Qur'an we read (3: 144),
'Muhammad is only a messenger; and many a messenger has gone
before him. So what if he dies or is killed! Will you turn your
back and go away in haste?' Could not this same principle be
applied to Jesus? Historically it is very difficult to dispute
the qur'anic verse since presumably it would not be possible
for observers at the time to tell the difference between Jesus
being crucified and his only appearing to be crucified - unless
what is suggested is that someone else was crucified in his
place. But any historical evidence that there is, both in the
New Testament and also in non-Christian Roman references (Josephus
and Tacitus), indicates that he was indeed executed by the Romans,
who were very efficient executioners. For more orthodox Christians,
who believe that Jesus' death was necessary as an atonement
for human sin, and that his resurrection demonstrated his divinity,
this is a vital issue. But because, together with many other
Christian scholars today, I do not myself believe that Jesus'
resurrection was a bodily event, or that his death was a necessary
atonement for human sin, whether he died on the cross is not
a vital theological issue, although as a matter of historical
evidence I believe that in fact he did die.
oooOooo
I do not however reject the idea of divine incarnation in all
its possible meanings. The sense in which I use it is its metaphorical
meaning. In English we often use the word 'incarnate' as a metaphor.
We might say, for example, that Winston Churchill incarnated
the British will to resist Hitler in 1940 - meaning that he
embodied it, that it was expressed in him in an exemplary way.
In this metaphorical sense, whenever a human being carries out
God's will in the world we can say that in that action His will
becomes incarnate, or embodied, on earth. I know that the word
'incarnation' is alien to Muslim discourse, but I would suggest
to you that the concept is not, the concept of God's will being
embodied in human actions. For Islamic discourse includes such
metaphors as 'Soul of Allah', referring to Jesus, and 'the Blood
of Allah', referring to the third Shiite Imam; and in the Qur'an
itself there is the metaphorical term 'the Hand of Allah'. Some
Christians today, although a minority within the theological
community, use the term 'incarnation' in this same metaphorical
way. Indeed one of my own books, for which a new edition is
now in course of publication, is called The Metaphor of God
Incarnate.
There is another important theological difference between Islam
and orthodox Christianity. This is the Jewish-Christian doctrine
of the primal fall of humanity, resulting in 'original sin'
from which redemption is needed by the blood of Christ, versus
the Islamic belief that we are weak and fallible creatures,
needing God's forgiveness, which comes purely by God's grace.
However not all Christians today affirm original sin and the
need for a vicarious atonement. I myself, along with many others,
and following the early Christian thinker Irenaeus rather than
Augustine, take the view that humanity was created as a weak
and immature creature capable of growing through our experience
of life in this world towards the beings ultimately intended
by God.
oooOooo
So, finally, for I have already spoken for long enough, there
are forms of both Islam and of Christianity that are incompatible.
And there are also forms of Islam and of Christianity that are
different but not incompatible. They are such that they can
exist side by side in peace and in mutual enrichment. My own
work as a Christian theologian has been within the reforming
movement in contemporary Christianity. As within Islam, this
is at present a minority position, strongly opposed both by
the Vatican in Rome and by non-Catholic evangelicals and fundamentalists.
But I believe in the long-term power of thought to bring about
change. I believe that in time mainstream Christianity will
come to see itself, not as the one and only true faith, but
as one among a plurality of true faiths, Judaism and Islam being
others, even though there will probably always be a continuing
fundamentalist element in the church which rejects this position.
And I venture to hope that an equivalent long-term development
is also taking place within Islam.
oooOooo
©
John Hick, 2005.
.
